The Insider News - CodeProject

codeface[^]:
It’s been known for some time that Anders Hejlsberg was doing something interesting in the JavaScript space, and when Anders is doing something interesting, it’s worth paying attention. This is, after all, the man who got Real Programmers to use Pascal, and pulled off C++++ (put two of the +’s over the other two: #! See what they did there?). Today the covers were taken off the latest project by the man himself, and it’s TypeScript: “a strict superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript”.

The good, the bad and the wishlist.

Would be great to have something better than JavaScript, yet has compatibility. Maybe some day will not need to have JavaScript in the middle.

And Douglas Crockford sayeth: https://plus.google.com/118095276221607585885/posts/MgzNUSTwjRt[^]

Quote:
Microsoft's TypeScript may be the best of the many JavaScript front ends. It seems to generate the most attractive code. And I think it should take pressure off of the ECMAScript Standard for new features like type declarations and classes. Anders has shown that these can be provided nicely by a preprocessor, so there is no need to change the underlying language.

I think that JavaScript's loose typing is one of its best features and that type checking is way overrated. TypeScript adds sweetness, but at a price. It is not a price I am willing to pay.

PS: the comments on Crockford's G+ thread are fantastic. Lots of interesting insight.

Director of Content Development, The Code Project

modified 2-Oct-12 22:52pm.